Sarah Manning, a con artist and thief, returns home after 10 months of thuggery to find a woman on a train platform who looks like her. Exactly like her. The woman then takes an abrupt leap off the platform in front of an oncoming train, killing herself. Sarah scoops up the woman’s purse and ID, and starts living her life as Beth Childs, a police detective struggling with a recent shootout-gone-wrong. That’s when things start to become a little complicated for Sarah, as she’s thrown head first into a lethal Sci-Fi conspiracy that turns her entire world upside down.

So that’s like, the Cliff’s Notes.

Sarah continues to dig into Beth’s life, trying to find out why Beth killed herself, while walking in her shoes at the same time. While she keeps up with the charade of being a detective, Sarah’s also evading an unknown assassin who wants her dead, all while trying to rehabilitate the relationship between herself and her foster mother and young daughter.

There’s a lot to chew on in Orphan Black and maybe that’s why it’s so compelling. But the BBC America series goes even deeper than that. It has that Cabin in the Woods thing going on – the less you know going in, the better off you’ll be, which makes it a wee bit hard to write about. But if you’re alive and read the Internet, you probably know that it’s a show about clones. (Though, that’s hardly a spoiler). And it’s this very plot device that has given us one of the best TV performances in a decade.

Tatiana Maslany portrays our main protagonist, Sarah Manning and also Beth Childs. And also Alison Hendrix, a suburban soccer mom. And also Cosima Niehaus, a grad student studying evolutionary developmental biology, and so on…(and I haven’t even mentioned my favorite of the clones…see photo). Maslany’s performance is so incredibly nuanced. She approaches these various characters as entirely separate entities, perfectly defining each character’s tone, body language, and facial expressions. She even flexes muscle with German, Ukrainian, and British accents even though Maslany herself is Canadian. It’s seriously a face-melting, mind-blowing performance to watch. She makes me giddy to be a TV fan. (The scenes that feature more than one clone are seamless – you can check out a Behind the Scenes featurette on the DVDs if you’re interested in the how-to.)

We can talk all day about how Maslany was totally snubbed by the Emmys and SAG awards. What you need to know is that this is the best [Sci-Fi] show I’ve seen in a really, really long time. Even if Sci-Fi isn’t quite your thing, it’s still completely accessible. There are conspiracies and clones and guns and mentally unstable assassins and super-secret secrets! It’s Television at its finest, never flubbing in pace or overstaying its welcome (Season 1 is a modest 10 episode run). It’s a breath of fresh air if you’re drowning in mediocre network fare.

Created by Graeme Manson and John Fawcett, the show has potential to go off in so many different directions. By season’s end, there are still so many questions to answer, including moral and ethical ones. Have we met all of the clones? Were more created and still have yet to be discovered? Who exactly is behind it and more importantly, why? It’s the kind of show where your finger’s on the trigger, ready to hit play on the next episode before you’ve even finished the one you’re on. It’s a binge-watchers paradise and I can’t wait to see what they come up with next.

Season Two Returns April 19, 2014 on BBC America.